[ On Thursday, September 25, 2003 at 11:38:36 (+0100), Shane M. Coughlan wrote: ]
> Subject: NetBSD being used as the core for secure OS distro
>
> Now, my question...I was drawn to NetBSD because of its small size (not much
> package litter in basic install...wonderful) and its portability.  However,
> I notice the consensus online appears to be that NetBSD is mainly for
> academic use, and that FreeBSD is better for commercial use, especially
> things like servers.  Given that you guys are experienced in such things,
> and honest, can you tell me what you think about that?  OpenBSD is
> interesting, but it seems to have a lot of hiccups with things like laptops.
> I'm not looking at it for this reason.

I don't know that I would break down the differences between NetBSD and
FreeBSD as being primarily "academic" and "commercial" in that sense.

I think NetBSD could be a very excellent base for your project.  However
there are some known limitations w.r.t. hardware support in
NetBSD-1.6.1, especially on i386, and for those reasons FreeBSD may make
a more practical base for your project.

(I use NetBSD as the basis for similar types of projects, though my
applications are much more server oriented and I also desire much more
architecture independence than FreeBSD currently offers.)

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

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